MovieChat Forums > The Last Man on Planet Earth (1999) Discussion > Bad idea if I ever heard one!

Bad idea if I ever heard one!

posted 17 years ago by Illegally_Insane
1 reply | jump to latest

I hope there aren't any women that believe this should happen!

If there are, they probably don't know as mucha bout their reproductive system as they think they do.

I'd like to first explain the MALE reproductive system, or rather just the "meat" of it all; sperm. See, every singel sperm cell in a man's sack is different due to a mutation, TRILLIONS of different combinations for a newborn exist. This is what enables the human being to adapt, and survive.

Now the human female's eggs on the other hand, unlike sperm, each egg is the same. Sure, you can easily trick an egg into mitosis (I think it's mitosis, either that or myosis (sp?)), and the result would be a clone. That is an exact genetic copy of the mother.

Over time this lack of diversity is going to cause problems because we're exposed to billions of different germs everyday, and without the ability to adapt, we're as good as extinct. Women too!

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Just call me Monsterman.

[–] thadcastle 13 years ago

You may have posted this before the research came out, but I'm still going to have to frown at your lack of imagination in that a future civilisation that would literally die otherwise solved some problems with cloning. God forbid.

Anyway, about a year ago somebody managed to replace a sperm's innards with that of a random cell taken from somebody else, so that it was still a sperm but with someone elses DNA.

But how would they make the sperm? Well technically they may not have to, artificial insemination requires a very small amount of sperm (technically just the one would do) and seeing how each sample of sperm in the sperm banks across the world currently holds millions of sperm each, and theres probably about a million samples, I don't think in the foreseeable future we would ever have to worry as long as the expiry dates held out.

Add on the fact that scientists have managed to take the web silk creating properties from spiders and spliced it into goats mammary glands (creating breasts that spring forth a more commercially viable supply of web silk), I'm pretty sure that a way to reproduce the sperm creating qualities of a man could be transferred into another organism.

Keep in mind that these are only a few methods thought up by some guy at 2am in the morning from his limited memory. Imagine for example a world where cloning was essential to mankind's survival (perhaps a world where men don't exist) and I'm damn sure there'd be a thousand ways researched, tested and working within a few years.

You seriously couldn't imagine that an entire world of scientists with a good lifetime each couldn't solve the problems in an area of science already well trodden? You couldn't suspend belief for that? Give the benefit of the doubt or simply rationalise that in a movie where biological warfare reached chromosome specific levels we weren't gonna find another way to get DNA inside an egg?